Headboards, footboards, and siderails are typically added to hospital beds to reduce the likelihood of a patient falling off a bed. However, patients lying upon hospital beds are occasionally entrapped by a portion of a bed, or slip through a gap in the bed, or are pinched or otherwise caught by the bed. In an effort to reduce the likelihood that a medical patient will be injured or entrapped by a hospital bed, the Food and Drug Administration released a document of nonbinding recommendations entitled “Guidance for Industry and Staff—Hospital Bed System Dimensional and Assessment Guidance to Reduce Entrapment,” FDA document number 1537 (hereinafter “the FDA document”), which issued on Mar. 10, 2006. The FDA document lists recommended minimum and maximum gaps or spacing between various portions of a hospital bed to reduce the likelihood of injury.
Movable siderails are desirable for protecting a patient from inadvertent bed egress, for example, while providing one or more alternate configurations for improving a caregiver's access to the patient and/or facilitating the patient's ingress and egress from the bed. However, movable siderails may increase the likelihood of patient entrapment and/or other situations in which a patient may be caught or pinched because the gaps or spacings are changeable between various portions of a bed so equipped.
Additionally, it is an aim of healthcare equipment providers to offer patient support devices that are easy to manipulate and which minimize required exertion by the operator. For patient support surfaces, siderails are ideally adjusted, with a minimum of effort, between positions facilitating intentional patient ingress and egress and positions offering security against unintentional egress. Although some known siderail mechanisms have been adapted to facilitate ingress, egress, and security, typically these have been positionable between lowered positions, locked raised positions, and lockable intermediate positions, where locking the siderails in the intermediate positions requires first moving the siderails to their locked raised positions, or beyond their locked raised positions, before lowering them back to the intermediate positions. However, when a patient is positioned (e.g. sitting) at the edge of a bed between, for example a lowered foot end siderail and a lowered head end siderail, the patient may block the motion of the siderail to its raised position and thus inhibit a caregiver's ability to move the siderail to the intermediate locked position.